Sandra Bloodworth

How workers brought down apartheid in South Africa

“We’ll find you, we’ll track you down, you will have to pay these debts and you may end up in prison.” That was Alan Tudge, Liberal minister for human services, using the media to threaten welfare recipients in 2016, when the government knew its method of calculating those robodebts was inaccurate and illegal.
In December 2020, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7483">Red Flag</a>
posed the question “Why is nobody in prison over robodebt?” Three and a half years later, we are still asking this question. 
Catherine Holmes, head of the royal commission into the scheme, reported to the governor-general on 7 July 2023. She referred a secret list of six individuals to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and other bodies for civil and criminal prosecutions. But the NACC, set up with great fanfare by Labor, refuses to investigate.
Colleen Taylor worked in Centrelink checking debts under the robodebt scheme. One of many workers who repeatedly objected to it, she wrote to her superiors in February 2017, “we are being asked to commit fraud”. On ABC’s <a href="https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2401H093S00">7.30</a> program on 17 June, she responded to the NACC’s excuse that another investigation might “oppress” those individuals, who Taylor referred to as “monsters”. Recalling the hell their victims experienced, she simply said, “It’s just awful”.
For months, Commissioner Holmes heard heartbreaking accounts from victims of the robodebt regime and investigated the actions of those who initiated and oversaw it. She concluded that the scheme was “an extraordinary saga, illustrating a myriad of ways that things can go wrong through venality, incompetence and cowardice”. Now there’s a clue for the NACC: venality. It means a willingness to accept reward for corrupt purposes. And yet the anti-corruption commission has no interest in investigating. 
Are we supposed to believe this was a case of something just “going wrong”? Scott Morrison, the self-proclaimed “welfare cop”, was responsible for robodebt as social services minister from December 2014 to September 2015, and as prime minister from 2018. Holmes concluded: “He failed to meet his ministerial responsibility to ensure that cabinet was properly informed about what the proposal actually entailed and to ensure that it was lawful”.
The scheme overturned the usual presumption of innocent until proven guilty, hounding innocent people to repay debts, burdened with the onus of proof against their accusers, their accusers being the powerful and well-resourced state. Some were charged with owing more than they had ever earned, either at work or from government support payments.
Confused and desperate attempts to track down pay slips and hours worked from seven years earlier, harassed by aggressive debt collectors, sliding into poverty as they tried to repay debts they never incurred, predictably left many anxious, traumatised and too mentally ill to work.
Morrison mocked Holmes’ naivety, saying her findings “are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of how government operates”. So here we have it from a former prime minister: governments operating illegally, and by any measure of human decency corruptly, is the accepted norm. Which seems to be the case, given the commission found that Morrison, top bureaucrats and other politicians continually denied the scheme was illegal, statements since revealed to be lies.
In early 2015, an executive minute to Morrison warned that the scheme needed legislative change. But a sentence indicating the problem was deleted—inexplicably, according to Kathryn Campbell, then Department of Human Services secretary. Liberal Senator Marise Payne was human services minister at the time the program was being devised. Her 2 February 2015 diary note says “cracking down—what can we do w/o [without] having to legislate[?]” She claimed she didn’t know why that opinion had later fallen “off the radar”.
By 2016-17 there were so many complaints being aired in the media, the ombudsman set an inquiry. It learned that the Department of Human Services, under Secretary Campbell, withheld key documents that cast doubt on the legality of the scheme during its development. Astoundingly, the ombudsman permitted the department it was investigating to influence the wording of his report, which the Coalition government then used to defend robodebt.
In June 2017, an eminent barrister, Peter Hanks KC, warned that robodebt was potentially illegal. Sitting in that room were top bureaucrats and lawyers within the Department of Social Services, including Secretary Kathryn Campbell and chief legal counsel Annette Musolino.
Then, in 2017, in the first of many successful challenges to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Emeritus Professor Terry Carney ruled that debts attributed to welfare recipients were being calculated illegally. Because the department chose not to appeal this result, it was kept secret—again under Campbell’s watch. An inquiry in 2017, said to have condemned robodebt, was shelved.
Then, in 2018, the law firm Clayton Utz advised that robodebt was illegal. But its report never left draft form, which meant it did not need to be acted on. Finally, with complaints reaching a crescendo, in September 2019 advice from the solicitor-general resulted in the scheme being shut down.
To ordinary mortals, this sounds like corruption to further party ideology that prioritises demonising the poor and vulnerable. The NACC’s refusal to examine the role of those who ran this scheme demonstrates the problem with relying on such institutions to hold corrupt public officials to account.
Last December Labor Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus claimed that the newly established NACC “demonstrates the Albanese Government’s commitment to combating corruption and restoring integrity, honesty and accountability to government”. Integrity, honesty and accountability were what was wanted by the half a million citizens whose lives were turned into a living hell because of the robodebt scheme. 
The royal commission found Campbell had been “responsible for a department that had established, implemented and maintained an unlawful program”. It found that she knew all along that a change in the law was needed to implement the scheme, “but did nothing of substance” to so advise the government.
Turns out Dreyfus’ threat, “I would want people to be afraid if they’ve engaged in corrupt activities”, was a load of hot air to get those campaigning for an anti-corruption watchdog off his back.
Why did so many go along with an illegal policy of such cruelty?
In Holmes’ view, Campbell knew Morrison wanted to “pursue the proposal and that the government could not achieve the savings” that were promised without it. Only after this damning report became public did Campbell resign—unlike unknown numbers of lower grade public servants who resigned in distress and disgust rather than implement the inhuman scheme.
The commission found that Morrison clearly communicated to the public and departmental bosses that his approach to the portfolio was to “crack down” on welfare cheats “rorting” the system. “In doing so, Mr Morrison contributed to a certain atmosphere in which any proposals responsive to his request would be developed”, Holmes concluded.
Colleen Taylor told ABC’s 7.30 that the workers knew the amount of fraud was massively overstated. From their experience, they thought it was only about 2 percent, definitely not more than 5.
It’s not that difficult to see why Labor aren’t pushing for the NACC to investigate. They share these politics of victimising the vulnerable. When might they want bureaucrats to carry out an unjust scheme to further their agenda? And they benefit from a culture of impunity for politicians, which seems to be more important to them than taking this chance to skewer their rivals. 
Labor’s promises that the NACC would hunt out corruption by public officials were clearly hollow rhetoric. Who, among the elite of politicians and public servants, wants a clear definition of corruption, or to know they can be held accountable, even penalised? 
Adding insult to injury, the names of those referred for civil or criminal investigation are secret—unlike the wrongly accused welfare recipients whose details were leaked to the media. Rachelle Miller, senior media adviser for the then Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge, recounted that Tudge demanded and received details of everyone who spoke to the press about their harassment. Those details, with comments to slander them as welfare cheats, were leaked to the Australian, which dutifully published it all. Tudge devised this scheme to counter an “orchestrated campaign” in what he regarded as “the left-wing press”. “This would send a clear message ... that maybe consider it [going to the media] twice. There were less people speaking out in the media, which was our intention”, testified Miller.
Miller also told the royal commission that she received feedback from the office of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, that darling of the liberal middle class, that the narrative of “cracking down on welfare cheats” was playing well in marginal “key” seats, like those in western Sydney.
Holmes commented, “It is remarkable how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the scheme's legality, how rushed its implementation was, how little thought was given to how it would affect welfare recipients and the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers on a quest for savings”.
Those maligned and damaged by the robodebt scheme are entitled to know if Labor’s much-touted NACC thinks that knowingly implementing an illegal and unjust scheme is considered corruption. There was much enthusiasm for an anti-corruption commission during the last federal election campaign, from the Greens and independents, but its establishment has so far only fuelled the cynicism and distrust of politicians it was meant to remedy. 
The response of rank-and-file public service workers provides a glimpse of an alternative way to make corrupt officials answer for their crimes. It relies on the decency of workers rather than a state institution like the NACC.
In January 2017, independent MP Andrew Wilkie wrote to the commonwealth ombudsman about numerous concerns raised with him by such workers. They had daily debt enforcement quotas, and management made staff compete for the most enforcements. Those who showed sympathy to robodebt victims were forced out of the department.
“Officers are discouraged from looking too closely at complex cases and have been managed out of debt recovery if too many questions are asked”, Wilkie wrote. “Officers have been penalised for actively suggesting [repayment deferral] to customers as an option.”
Colleen Taylor told the commission that she wrote to DHS Secretary Kathryn Campbell in January 2017 following an all-staff email assuring workers there was no change to the way the department was calculating debts. She told Campbell there had been a “dramatic change” between the previous manual assessment of payment and income discrepancies, and the new system that relied heavily on income averaging.
She told the hearing that one of her colleagues quit over the scheme, while others discussed how they could stop it. “There was a lot of discussion of just how unfair it was, and sympathy for the information that was out there in the media”, Taylor told the commission. Even in a case made incorrect by an employer’s typo, “I argued the point and they said, ‘well, if you don’t like it, you can just go’.”
Given that the NACC’s definition of corruption includes when public officials “breach public trust”, “abuse their office”, or “misuse information”, you might think some one, two or more should end up in jail. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. 
Is Labor likely ever to admit its anti-corruption commission is designed to protect the privileged?
Rather than campaign for an anti-corruption body, our energies would be much better spent rebuilding decent unions, building a left that organises to fight, to use our collective power to force
governments to back down. 
There were workers who bravely tried to stand up to their bosses rather than carry out fraud. If they had been organised into a collective fight, they would have offered a better chance of stopping robodebt than relying on an institution like the NACC. Such outfits will always be headed by bureaucrats who invariably share the values exposed by Catherine Holmes. Why would we rely on them to hold any of the elite and powerful to account?

Labor’s anti-corruption commission refuses to investigate robodebt corruption

Lenin’s theory of a revolutionary party

Mass protests change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds confidence and generates a sense of strength.
This experience lies at the heart of all famous movements against tyranny and oppression, all social action which has won radical reforms or ended wars. Protests are not just some strategy to pressure politicians to grant our demands, even though at times they do. They are essential if fundamental social change is to be achieved.
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin summed up a process which he observed during mass strikes across the Russian empire more than 100 years ago:
“The masses, which have ... often been ignored and even despised by superficial observers, enter the political arena as active combatants. These masses are learning in practice ... are taking their first tentative steps, feeling their way, defining their objectives, testing themselves.” 
That is, they were learning that they could run the world themselves and that they didn’t have to just put up with the rich and powerful running society in their own interests.
We glimpsed very tentative beginnings of this process in the weekly marches of tens of thousands and other protests in solidarity with Gaza around Australia. A minority have been shocked into passionate activity by Israel’s genocidal war. It is important to recognise what makes such developments precious.
Demonstrations are really a form of a “people’s assembly” in which participants can debate and discuss politics, strategy and tactics, and strengthen their collective resolve. Public spaces we have sat in or walked across, never exchanging more than a glance or a smile with others, are transformed by demonstrations. Now, the space is ours. Others gather around, considering whether to join in, whether to spill into the streets and march.
As the famous art critic and novelist John Berger put it in a 1968 essay:
“A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function ... It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together ... By demonstrating, [the protesters] manifest a greater freedom and independence—a greater creativity ... than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating, they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.”
At protests, people browse information stalls, some of which raise many issues, not just the issue about which the protest has been called. People read leaflets, buy radical papers and books they’ve never encountered before and which both confirm and challenge many of the ideas they bring with them. Their political horizons are broadened.
At the end of 2023 and into this year, smaller protests spiralled out from the confidence generated at the central weekly marches against Israel’s war. Hundreds rallied at local council meetings, demanding they pass motions of solidarity with Gaza and fly the Palestinian flag. Local suburban rallies, pickets of arms suppliers to Israel and of Israeli ships at the wharves attracted hundreds. Banners, stickers and posters have appeared around city streets in numbers not seen for years.
A new generation of university students has rejuvenated Students for Palestine, which was originally formed in previous Israeli wars on Gaza. They have mobilised large, lively protests with fresh energy. Teenage organisers of high school walk outs in November demolished in a few scathing sentences the insults hurled at them by school principals, politicians and the media.
“I’ve learned a lot coming here, meeting people and standing up with others for justice”, one of them said; another that she learned more being at the strike rally for two hours than “in an entire semester of history”. “Kids in Gaza can’t go to school and haven’t been able to for weeks”, a student from Pascoe Vale Girls’ School said. “Missing one afternoon seems very unimportant when you think about that.”
As individuals, many of them probably instinctively drew conclusions about Israel’s terror. But the big protests created an incentive to get together. This then built their confidence to defy the principals, and then to confront the media’s hostile questioning.
No amount of respectful lobbying of MPs or petitioning of the UN can demonstrate so clearly how society operates. The students discovered, and demonstrated to others, that democracy, free speech and the right to protest are really only meant for those who go along with whatever barbarity our governments enact or support.
Such grassroots protests pose the questions: whose democracy? Whose order? They ask of others: help us disrupt the “order” that entrenches the power of the already powerful.
Disrupting business as usual through protests can build a sense of power by participants taking back some control over circumstances that are normally beyond our control. Disruption says: this movement is one worth taking risks for. Defying those who wield authority in this hideous system enhances democracy and free speech.
The activity of organising rallies, sit-ins, media appearances, strikes and much more promotes debate. It helps to clarify political issues, reveals the truth about our society and shows what the mainstream political parties really stand for. And activists able to inspire wider layers to rebel and build an ever expanding and powerful movement emerge as leaders—leaders with genuine courage and conviction, unlike our purported “leaders” in parliament, who do only what’s best for their careers.
Yet, as Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, argues: “It should be obvious that humans do not spontaneously adopt the correct response to a given set of injustices”. So the debates such movements generate are vital.
Socialists want to win more people, especially leading activists, to an anti-capitalist perspective; one recognising that the root cause of pretty much every problem in the world is that society is divided by class and organised to enrich a minority at the expense of the majority. We publish our ideas in Red Flag and hold public meetings while organising beside other activists so our perspectives can be tested in practice.
Ultimately, workers’ strikes are the most powerful protest. Trade unions can challenge the right of capitalists to exploit us, to dominate us, to make profits—the very basis of this society. They can inspire others even more than even large demonstrations. Mass demonstrations of striking workers embody power, not just symbolically, but in reality.
Workers have been ground down by four decades of attacks that have led to increased wealth inequality and degraded public services. Unions are weakened by defeats and the policies of their leaders, who spend most of their time sucking up to the powerful and the politicians, rather than fighting them. But workers can at times be convinced to act even when their own leaders refuse to. 
A vital aspect of the art of politics is learning how to link the vitality of student and other street protests with workers’ power. A movement of radical militancy, one noted for supporting every oppressed group and opposing attacks on democratic and union rights can, in the right circumstances, convince workers to take a stand.
Writing in a jail cell in early 1915 after being imprisoned for anti-war activity, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary socialist, argued that the world faced a choice: socialism or barbarism. 
Her words about World War One strike a chord today as we witness the atrocities in Gaza enabled by Western imperialist powers—and while leaders of the trade union movement refuse to lift a finger to end the bloodshed despite so many trade union members wanting to take anti-war action.
Imperialism’s “bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery”. “But”, she went on, “we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the working class ... do not understand how to learn, then they will go under to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world”.
If Luxemburg is to be proven right, these fundamental aspects of mass movements and of how people become capable of challenging capitalism is of vital importance.
This is a revised version of a 2019 article, “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6891">Strike, rally, occupy: building a mass movement</a>”. It has been updated for the 2024 Red Flag campus supplement.

The importance of a mass movement

And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.



Percy Bysshe Shelley, the revolutionary English poet, wrote these lines in 1819. The years in which he grew up, when revolution was in the air, had given way to a time like ours: ruling-class parasites and reactionaries seemed invincible. He yearned for a mass revolutionary movement to challenge them.
His moods oscillate between despondency and optimism. He employs metaphors based on nature—wind, volcanoes, plants, the seasons—to express his deeply felt anger at injustices inflicted on the oppressed by governments and capitalists. But his poetic images also illustrate the belief, to which he tenaciously clings, that the mass of workers and the poor will again “rise like lions” to confront their oppressors.
If you empathise with the young poet’s turmoil two hundred years ago, this article aims to convince you of a strong theme in his writing: that spring must follow winter.
The industrial revolution was just taking off and the working class was in its infancy. Shelley instinctively saw that the vicious system of capitalism would breed discontent and struggles. During the “wintry rest”, quiescence does not necessarily signify contentment. Anger and discontent grow beneath the surface, seeds germinating for the inevitable burst of spring protests and struggles.
The history of capitalism in the intervening two centuries proved Shelley right.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, three decades after the untimely death of Shelley—whose revolutionary spirit they greatly admired—began developing a theoretical and political analysis that justifies the young poet’s belief in the inevitability of recurring mass struggles.
They noted the effect of the constant changes to production as capitalists compete for markets and profits. “All that is solid melts into air”, they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Colonial invasions foster racism against original populations; economic slumps or bankruptcy of individual companies throw people into unemployment; the environment is degraded; wars destroy millions of lives, creating refugees who join the ranks of the oppressed worldwide.
There is always at least a minority who are repelled by the inhumanity and destruction. But whether they can mobilise large numbers into protest depends on many factors. For instance, are workers combative and confident? Is there an organisation capable of inspiring and organising action?
Struggles that reach awe-inspiring heights give way to “wintry rest”. How long it lasts depends on the context. Is the movement crushed by ruling-class brutality? Or do wrong strategies and tactics lead to a stalemate that saps people’s energy and belief in their own ability to win, or a combination of both?
In Australia in 1974, the number of strikes per worker was one of the highest in the world; more than 50 percent of workers were union members. The women’s liberation movement changed our lives. Thousands of radical students and workers stood up against US imperialism and Australia’s support for its war on Vietnam. Radicalised youth questioned everything, fought for education reforms.
So why did the radicalism give way to the “wintry rest” we chafe against today?
The Communist Party and the ALP convinced most militant workers that class collaboration would achieve more gains than class struggle. The Labor government’s Prices and Incomes Accord brought union officials to the table to negotiate with employers who, more class conscious than our side, inflicted defeat after defeat of previously strong unions. Unions policed their members, enforcing a mutually agreed moratorium on strikes.
And so the rich engorged themselves as workers’ living standards, welfare, health and education were cut under Labor from 1983 to 1996.
Workers weren’t totally crushed but were badly placed to fight the Labor government. There was widespread confusion as former traditions of organisation and struggle were denigrated and undermined. Union membership suffered a catastrophic decline to just 12 percent of workers today. Movement activists were impacted by this process, limiting determined, militant struggle. 
So the apparent apathy today is not a “natural” state in Australia. It is the consequence of the arguments by reformists. They initiated this disaster and won because there was no socialist organisation large enough to win the confidence of militant workers to fight Labor’s introduction of neoliberalism.
Will there ever be another spring?
As Shelley, Marx and Engels thought, capitalism will provoke new waves of struggle. Shelley wrote about this in his political poem “The Mask of Anarchy” in 1819. It was his response to the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester. He recognised that the state’s repression could provoke people into action:
And that slaughter to the Nation Shall steam up like inspiration, Eloquent, oracular; A volcano heard afar.



Shelley thought workers could seize the opportunity created by the state’s open display of brutal repression. He wanted them to recognise their potential power against their capitalist rulers. He hoped his words would help foster and build the struggle into an uprising:
And these words shall then become Like Oppression’s thundered doom Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again—again—again— Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.








This poem has inspired generations in their struggles. It is a clarion call to fight, not just plead or petition for our rights.
Shelley’s poetic urging is still relevant today. Our situation is not frozen for all time. 
Capitalism is irrational and crisis-prone: the inevitable economic slumps, wars, authoritarian governments, oppression all regularly provoke people into protesting. When exactly the inhumanity provokes a larger, more profound and all-encompassing reaction is not predictable.
Australia is part of the world system, so the first shoots of a new movement may be nurtured by events anywhere around the globe.
Israel has been murdering Palestinians and occupying their land since 1948. Gaza has been a prison denied basic necessities for sixteen years. Who, just months before October, could have predicted that the supposed “peace”—a dreadful term to describe subjugation by a genocidal state—would give way to war and global mass protests of support for the Palestinians? As I write, a new generation is rising, reinvigorating experienced campaigners.
Shelley hoped his writings would be scattered like seeds by the wind “to quicken a new birth” of struggle. Ideas can influence how people respond. However, it’s not ideas alone that drive millions into struggle, but the social reality of this inhuman system. Then, ideas can determine whether victories are won or the struggle falters.
Marx observed that in their struggles, workers’ political understanding and confidence could be rapidly transformed. This became one of the key theoretical understandings of Marxism. Revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Antonio Gramsci in Italy all incorporated it into their theories of workers’ revolution.
As Lenin argued when addressing students in 1916: “Only struggle discloses to [the exploited class] the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will”.
People motivated to protest because of the suffering of the Palestinians can begin to see how capitalism is the root cause of not just this one issue, but of all the suffering and injustice.
But there is not some linear process from the first protests to mass movement and revolution. How far the struggles develop depends heavily on what strategies and tactics workers adopt. The slogans raised, the actions organised by leading activists can in particular moments turn the tide of struggle, and even of history.
Members of that revolutionary party that was missing in Australia in the 1970s need to be skilled at interpreting any given situation, how to convince activists of the next step, when to retreat, when to go forward, defeating political arguments that hold the struggle back. 
These skills cannot be learnt simply from book learning, though studying past struggles is essential. Reading the mood, assessing which appeal will be likely to convince large numbers of militants, has to become second nature. Years of struggle inculcate members with an instinct that is the result of accumulated experience, suffering with the oppressed, celebrating their gains.
We can’t predict the terrain of struggles from general principles. Intervention by organised revolutionaries is a critical factor in determining the outcome.
And so, if you want to see transformative, mass left-wing radicalism in Australia, the time to be active is not when the struggle bursts out. It is now. The longer those who hope in their hearts for a world of equality, justice, beauty and joy hesitate to take the first steps, the more likely it will be that embryonic movements will fail to develop to their full potential.
This means being involved in organising campaigns wherever we can. Is there discontent on your campus or at work? If no-one argues to fight, the discontent can give way to resignation. The small struggles of today might seem inconsequential, but they are where the activists of the next spring of radicalism can develop the skills that might change the course of history.
Shelley’s optimism should be read as a clarion call to socialist activism now—because after such a long “wintry rest”, can spring be far behind?

Can there be a mass left-wing movement in Australia again?

You might be pleased to know that you can now read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels with racist references edited out. But the misogyny remains, including the notion that women “love semi-rape” along with the disabled villain trope.
Publishers’ “sensitivity editing” of classics by writers such as Fleming, Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie has created a storm in a teacup. Anti-“woke” warriors have denounced it as censorship—while their far-right audience is waging a determined campaign for censorship.
Children’s drag queen story times are under attack in the US, Australia, the UK and Europe. Hundreds of books are being stripped from school library shelves in the US, including those by Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison and James Patterson. Even the Bible is being removed from some.
I looked at the edits highlighted in the media. They rip language out of social context, prioritise the superficial over substance, are often pointless or misplaced. There is no rejection of hetero-normativity, demeaning disability tropes or the anti-working-class, homophobic or anti-Irish bias which abound in these classics. They do not shield us from offence or hurt and do nothing to stamp out damaging stereotypes.
The point is not to defend the original texts but to recognise that the publishers are just another lot of capitalists jumping on the bandwagon of gesture politics, hoping to boost profits.
In Roald Dahl’s The Twits, the word “weird” is cut from the phrase “weird African language of the monkeys”. Why not delete “African” instead? In any case, it remains a vile, misanthropic text employing vulgar tropes, including that of an ugly woman disfigured with a glass eye. And children are encouraged to find mean cruelty towards both humans and monkeys humorous.
Dahl’s Augustus Gloop is no longer “enormously fat”, just “enormous”. What a win for those subject to body shaming. A reference to a woman as an “old hag” becomes an “old crow” in The Witches, gladdening the heart of every anti-sexist!
Christie is infamous for a novel, the title of which was a line from a popular minstrel song which included the N word. The novel has nothing to do with racism and the title was changed without fanfare decades ago. It was never used in the US. Fixation on that offence means there is no mention of her anti-Semitic tropes.
Instead, media reports have highlighted the fact that the word “black”, used by Christie to describe Mr Akibombo, a West African, is deleted in Hickory Dickory Dock. Have they not heard of Black Pride in the ’60s, Black Power, Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter? OK, it can be racist in a particular context, but it is not here.
And early in the book there is a clear rejection of anti-African racism. The owner of the student hostel in London, where the novel is set, suggests that if American students support the colour bar, she’d get rid of the students from places like India and Africa.
“‘Not while I’m in charge’, said Mrs Hubbard [the hostel matron] coldly. ‘And anyway, you’re wrong. There’s no feeling of that sort here among the students ... Sally [a white American] and Mr Akibombo have lunch together quite often, and nobody could be blacker than he is.’”
The BBC’s adaptation of the novel makes a mockery of claims to editing in accordance with today’s sensibilities. Assuming that Christie was racist, to be safe they simply cut all the people of colour in the hostel from the narrative. So, instead of students of colour living amicably with whites, they are all white!
Some left-wing people are inclined to welcome the edits. That would be understandable if they were not so tokenistic. However, apart from the logistics of editing centuries of literature, there are serious objections.
It was a step forward when social movement activists established that language matters. It is good that authors writing today get advice about offensive terms.
But language is not the essence of oppression. It reflects attitudes generated by social reality. Its meaning is grounded in the political, historical and cultural context. That’s why it can change with struggles against oppression. It’s true that language can reinforce bigoted attitudes, but it does not cause the structural discrimination and inequality that constitute oppression.
Encountering outdated language can be an opening for young people to learn about the context of such texts. Shielding either young or old from the possibility of being upset by outdated texts denies them essential knowledge showing that struggles have changed the world for the better. Ignorance of that past only benefits the political right’s efforts to return to the conditions that bred the objectionable language in the first place.
The hard fact is, it’s not possible to live in a safe cocoon. The far right is on the march. Sheltering the young, or indeed adults, from offensive historical texts does nothing to prepare them to recognise the right’s agenda. That is the first step to becoming a confident fighter to push them back into the sewers from which they are emerging.

Publishers on the bandwagon of gesture politics

“The ’60s”. What images this conjures up: youth rebellion; drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll; radicalism that helped to stop the Vietnam War. But actually, some of the most important events of this decade and the next were workers’ industrial struggles.
Two million people migrated to Australia from Europe between 1945 and 1965. They usually filled dirty, dangerous and soul-destroying jobs for substandard wages and conditions. Disillusionment replaced hope, reviving traditions of class struggle from their homelands. Seventy percent of the 4,000-strong Mt Isa Mines workforce in western Queensland were migrants—47 nationalities in all.
From July 1964 to April 1965, their iconic battle reached into homes around the country. It was one of the most controversial industrial upheavals of the decade. The arch-conservative Courier Mail described the place like this:
“[A] smoke stack and slag heap dominating a township of shabby houses, unspeakable hotels, and inordinately expensive shops. Toss in ... a wretched summer climate, fearsome insect plagues, and great isolation—and it stands forth as a black prince among mining towns.”
It all began over showers. Company-owned homes had no running hot water. Mine showers were assumed to be sufficient, but they were notoriously unreliable. Pat Mackie, the best-known leader of the coming struggle, said that there was nothing worse than cleaning off “coated grease and the dust of the black earth” in a cold shower.
In May 1964, on the third day of hot water running out while they showered, Mackie reportedly stormed into the superintendent’s office dripping with soap. This one angry act stirred the other miners to action. After two threats of strikes by angry unionists, management finally fixed the plumbing.
In July, a large meeting discussed the issues workers were fuming about. Undemocratic control by their union officials in the Brisbane office rankled. And they needed higher wages plus an increased bonus for working in the dangerous lead dust.
In the struggle that unfolded, the shenanigans of Mount Isa Mines, the do-nothing, right-wing Australian Workers Union (AWU), the Industrial Commission, the Industrial Court and the High Court read like a Kafka novel.
The AWU secretly changed the union rules so that delegates couldn’t claim paid leave for union business. Consequently, Mackie was sacked for union activity in work time, which to his knowledge was his right. The union also refused to recognise delegates elected at large members’ meetings, declaring the gatherings illegal. And it joined the press attack on Mackie and other activists as “Reds” (communists) trying to destroy the Australian way of life.
But all the miners wanted was the “fair go” they’d been promised.
On 4 August, the Industrial Commission ruled that a wage increase would be “merely a camouflaged bonus payment”, something that was beyond its power to grant. But five years earlier, the Commission had used the opposite argument! Mackie, in his account of the conflict, Mt Isa, the story of a dispute, noted:
“No bonus because it was a wage increase, no wage increase because it was a bonus. It was clear to every man ... that on whatever basis they made their just claims to a fairer share of the wealth they created, they would get nowhere ... This was, perhaps, the strongest single factor in precipitating the dispute.”
A mass meeting after this “bombshell” decision elected a negotiating team that the union members trusted. They invited members of craft unions, all affiliated to the local Trades and Labour Council (TLC), to the next meeting to discuss action around their common demands. And the miners voted to affiliate to the TLC in defiance of their Brisbane officials, who persistently refused to cooperate with the other unions.
When the company refused to discuss a pay rise, the negotiating team presented it with the meeting’s decision: men working on contract would exercise their legal right to move onto wages.
The gist of it was this: the men, now earning about half what a contractor could, maintained production at the level expected for wages. Inevitably, output fell—contract work pushes workers to speed up and work longer for better pay, thereby increasing profits for the bosses.
For months, they became, in Mackie’s words, “bogged down in tortuous, fruitless legal argumentation”. The company argued in the commission that the workers’ wage move was tantamount to a strike. Legally, it was no such thing.
The union expelled Mackie, but the workers continued to regard him as their leader. On 21 November, frustrated by the AWU officials’ treachery, they set up a Council for Membership Control of the AWU (CMC). Union meetings became by default CMC assemblies. Mackie wrote that, in doing this, the workers had “got the bit between their teeth for the first time”. They would not surrender lightly.
Two days later, for the third time, the Industrial Commission ruled in the workers’ favour on the contract issue, noting that what they were doing could not be considered a strike. Even the one dissenting commissioner admitted that they could not order the men to work on contract because the award allowed them to choose contract or wages.
The company immediately appealed to the Industrial Court. Presiding Justice Hanger virtually instructed the commissioners to overturn their ruling. They dutifully did what they had ruled impossible days before and instructed union members to stop “taking part in an unauthorised strike”.
Near the end of 1964, the Nicklin Country-Liberal Party government declared a state of emergency. Anyone refusing to work on contract faced a £100 fine or six months in jail. Gordon Sheldon, the company’s public relations officer, wrote that, at the next union mass meeting, AWU officials could not make themselves heard over the “jeering, yelling, catcalling”. They left “looking angry and perplexed”.
Mackie was confirmed as the chair and order reigned, making redundant the huge contingent of cops assembled to suppress the expected mayhem. The workers voted overwhelmingly to refuse to work on contract without the wage rise, Mackie’s reinstatement and improved contract conditions.
The meeting, and all future ones, became a public affair—including women and children, journalists, company staff and even some businesspeople.
Women formed a support organisation that at times had 100 attendees at its meetings. They voted in union meetings, holding up the children’s hands to participate, and affiliated to the Mt Isa TLC, to which they sent delegates.
The defiance and unity, plus the expectation that the company would have to negotiate, created a carnival atmosphere. But two days later, 2,700 were locked out and the company closed the mine.
The biggest meeting ever seen in the town, about 4,000, ensued. All 14 unions in the town established relief committees. And support from around Australia poured in—messages, union donations, some voting to levy all members a percentage of their wages, money immediately collected at work. The women recorded and distributed all money.
There were some sympathy strikes and union actions, but nowhere near enough, minimising the pressure that could have been put on the government.
A second state of emergency was declared on 27 January 1965, following the company’s announcement that it would open the gates to workers who agreed to the old conditions. Anyone in the Mt Isa-Cloncurry area could be arrested without warrant if, “in the opinion of a police officer” they were a threat to law and order. No appeal was allowed.
Political squads of police descended on the city, turning it into a mini police state.
Mackie and John McMahon, the president of the local TLC, who were away building support for the miners, were barred from returning to their homes in Mt Isa! This provoked an incredible outpouring of anger and bitterness around the country. It was on the front pages of every newspaper, dominating radio and TV broadcasts. Mackie became a household hero, at least in working-class households.
The Queensland TLC called for a statewide general strike, and the response was massive. Widespread union actions looked like they could become a national workers’ mobilisation.
Rather than forcing men back on contract, the draconian provocation had hardened their determination.
Some of the press turned against Premier Nicklin. But the ABC was the most strident purveyor of company lies to the end. Only later was it revealed that its “correspondent” was Sheldon, the company PR officer!
Mt Isa Mines threatened to sack the 800 men working above ground if insufficient numbers turned up to work on contract. Police, in effect acting against the government’s state of emergency, negotiated with unionists to allow a mass meeting. Fred Thompson, the popular north Queensland organiser of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, seemed to sense the need for a positive note:
“If nothing else emerges from this dispute other than the wonderful spirit of understanding and brotherhood between the different nationalities which comprise our community, then we will still have made a tremendous gain.”
Enthusiastic clapping and cheering indicated the pride workers took in this.
With police having undermined the government, and with growing unrest about the dispute, a secret cabinet meeting suspended the state of emergency. Pete Thomas, author of a pamphlet titled <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/australia/1965/19650228.htm">Storm in the Tropics</a> gloated: “The Nicklin government wilted and cracked. It had set out to be a Napoleon—only to find itself within a week, a Humpty Dumpty instead”.
Two Sydney wharfies drove Mackie 3,220 km through arid lands into Mt Isa, evading police blockades. Two Italian militants hid him until he could attend a mass meeting, causing a sensation.
Picketing became necessary. From 17 February, every morning for two months, hundreds of men and women turned up to confront hundreds of cops.
Endless hearings and appeals in the Industrial Commission and Court, from which the Mt Isa delegates were excluded, dragged on.
Then on 17 March, at the urging of the AWU, the government banned picketing. Printed material urging workers not to return to work was banned. But a Finnish language news sheet continued to appear. Police raided homes, without warrants, day after day looking for their printing machine. Women and children took the brunt of their brutality. But the cops could never break their nerve and never found the “criminal” equipment.
With the courts openly supporting the company, the police given police-state powers and the AWU conniving to get scabs from out of town, strikes and bans on the movement of copper were the minimum needed to win.
But this was 1965; the upsurge of working-class radicalism was still to come. Unions were intimidated by threats of fines under the Penal Powers (which would be smashed by a general strike in 1969).
Mackie was committed to nonviolence and avoiding arrests, so he argued that the ban on picketing meant there was no alternative but to return to work. If they didn’t, scabs would undermine their traditions of solid trade unionism.
At a subdued meeting on 7 April, craft unionists voted, “with grim resignation”, 200 to 70, to accept the Queensland TLC’s recommendation to return to work. A narrow majority at the AWU meeting followed suit in a mood of “deep smouldering disgust and indignation”.
Dozens, including Mackie, could never again work in Mt Isa. But there were gains.
Management did not dare treat the workers with the contempt of the past. The contract system was overhauled, making it transparent and on better terms. Workers did get a pay rise, though less than they wanted. And the women’s committee continued campaigning for improved conditions in the city.
Other less tangible gains were of supreme importance. The unity they achieved demonstrated the transformative role of workers’ struggle. And their stand contributed to a growing tide of industrial struggles. At its peak in the early to mid-1970s, workers’ share of national income reached the highest in Australian history.
It stands as part of a proud history of migrant organisation and leadership of both migrants and Australian-born workers.
Struggles such as this build confidence and pride, reflected in the words from two of the participants. Sylvia Viani said 25 years later:
“I do not regret a thing ... If you cannot stand up for your rights, you may as well never have been born.”
And Pat Mackie concluded:
“The spontaneity of the Isa people’s rebellion ... the spontaneous organising of the wives, in taking the matter of their own freedom into their own hands ... was a living lesson in the constructive social potentialities of rank-and-file working people. It was a triumph of the human spirit.”

‘A triumph of the human spirit’: The Mt Isa industrial battle of 1964-65

It was 1961. Migrants erected a sign on the roadside twenty kilometres outside of Albury: “Bonegilla, Place of No Hope”. The authorities left it there, perhaps for fear of further inflaming the bitterness that inspired it.
Bonegilla was a reception and training centre for immigrants. They were supposed to learn English and be found a job, neither of which turned out to be guaranteed. Indentured for two years, they were obliged to take whatever jobs the government sent them to.
After World War Two, there were 8.5 million war refugees around Europe, euphemistically labelled displaced persons (DPs) by the United Nations. The Australian administrator of the UN rehabilitation scheme in 1944-48 shamefully referred to them as “the flotsam and jetsam of the war”.
Between 1947 and 1951, most migrant arrivals to Australia were refugees. Preference was given to British and northern Europeans, considered more white than southern Europeans.
Bonegilla’s capacity was expanded from about 1,500 in 1947 to 7,700 by 1950. In “emergencies”, such as recessions or the 1949 coal strike, which meant periods of fewer jobs, overcrowding was the norm.
Approximately 320,000 people from 35 different ethnic backgrounds passed through Bonegilla, the longest running of 50 such centres. It closed in 1971.
Its management regime was driven by a bureaucratic mentality that regarded immigrants as mere chattels, a view cultivated by official attitudes and government policy.
Chifley, the Labor prime minister, summed up the racist fears of the ruling class in his slogan “Populate or Perish!”
Glenda Sluga, in her history of Bonegilla, argues that public proclamations “reinforced not only the illusion and practice of ‘control’, but the assumption that it was ... necessary”. For example, Arthur Calwell, the minister for information, informed the public in November 1947: “We shall have to select them [the migrants] because ... We do not want traitors and collaborators”.
They were thoroughly vetted to ensure that they were strong and healthy and with no communist sympathies. And it was clear that they were destined to do dirty, soul-destroying jobs for wages Australian-born people would not accept.
Bonegilla was a former army camp used to incarcerate prisoners of war. Spartan and dilapidated, accommodation was timber, tin-roofed and unlined huts. Wide gaps in the walls provided ventilation but no protection from mosquitoes, flies, the winter cold or the dust storms.
Crammed into huts with no partitioning, all meals served in the canteen with no choice, the interned were stripped of dignity.
Those billeted at the perimeter had a three-kilometre walk to the administrative centre. Personnel from the Department of Immigration described it as “very dirty and poorly equipped”.
As Sluga comments: “No one had ever pictured the lucky country in the shape of tin army huts and barbed wire compounds”.
Oral accounts capture the careless lack of empathy of those in authority over them.
Augustus, an Austrian, determined to make the most of this new life, tells of having their belongings searched when their suitcases arrived:
“Books were in there he ran through the pages and out came a branch of Oak and a blue flower [carefully preserved in his last hours in Europe]. He took them and tossed them into a sort of incinerator. I was ready to blow ... That young Ostralian officer could NOT know what he did to me.”
Nina, a well-educated German from a comfortable background, recounted her arrival with her husband:
“Men all on this side, women all that side. Some people panicked because they had heard [at] concentration camp too, men one side, women other side ... We were just like cattle, here follow us—men were more than one kilometre away. We were not told. We were just treated like stupid sheep.”
Sluga sums up the accounts she recorded as “resigned disappointment, and often bitter bewilderment”.
The family, that sacred bedrock of the Australian Way of Life, was brutally disregarded. Sons and daughters over 16 were subject to employment directions.
Young women were generally sent to canneries, clothing factories or as “mother’s helpers”, nurses’ aides and the like. One family’s daughter was sent to Sydney, the mother and younger daughter to a Cowra Holding Centre for women and children while the father and son worked all around NSW.
Estonians Marta and her elderly mother had spent five years in refugee camps. Her mother spent years in Cowra before being returned to Bonegilla as “mother’s helper” for Marta, who now had children.
Names could peremptorily be “Australianised”. Even getting married gave officials control over them. Writing to the migration official about Marta and Thomas’ application for permission to marry, the camp manager wrote: “John ... should eventually make a considerable [sic] better than average citizen”. Of “Margaret”, he opined, “I am quite satisfied that she will eventually prove a good Australian”.
However, this authoritarian oppression provoked protests.
In 1950, women at the Cowra Holding Centre raised a black flag, indicating mutiny against their children’s rations. There was no press comment or official reaction. In Bonegilla, Catholic priest, Father Collins, complained about the treatment of men who had staged a hunger strike and refused to obey orders.
Dismissed by the manager as “meddling”, his dogged defence of his followers led to a number of investigations. One concluded that “the rule of intimidation” was the norm. Migrants employed at the camp who joined a union were threatened with the sack if they maintained contact with it.
Between October 1951 and June 1952, 5,325 voluntary Italian migrants arrived. Having paid half their fare, and tenured for two years, they expected the government would honour its commitment to find them jobs. But recession left them languishing with no employment and no explanation of why.
Guards appointed by the manager, a Sergeant Dawson, (which were actually illegal) policed their “morals”—for example, enforcing the separation of men and women. They were denied newspapers; even English classes were far and few between. Several told Sluga that you could learn virtually any language—but not English!
In April 1952, a hut was inexplicably burned down. Men started sitting on the railway tracks to stop trains that could take them to Melbourne. Then in July, 2,500 signed a protest petition, and the Border Morning Mail informed the Albury population that a riot was threatened.
An army convoy of 200 fully armed troops were involved in “exercises” on the perimeter, and the press was banned from the camp. About 2,000, mostly Italians, gathered to protest. As they marched to the main office, imagine their terror when four tanks bearing machine guns on top bore down on them.
Eros recalled that there “was no work for anybody. Somebody start to get mad and they start to throw stones at the main building”.
Giovanni says they asked for jobs or to be sent back to Italy. When the manager said he had no authority to do either, they “started to revolt”. 
“We burned two or three huts and set fire to the church”, he related. Not because of hostility to the church. They were just fed up with being told to “have patience, God is on your side”.
“We had no intention really to burn anything, we just wanted to show ... [that] we mean business.”
Later, the Italian consul addressed them: “You are fortunate to be in a country like Australia”. Giovanni said:
“People rush on the stage and nearly killed him. His car burned, the hall ... was destroyed. The police had to ... rescue him through the back door. And that was the Bonegilla revolt of 1952.”
Speculation as to what happened was rife, but no-one bothered to investigate the reasons for the rebellion. Discontents were just dismissed as coming from “outsiders”, or “communist agitators”; protests were put down to the “Italian propensity to demonstrate”.
Dawson, notorious for sanctioning violence by the guards to maintain “order”, called for ASIO to be brought in, for a permanent police presence and for deportations.
But they showed that protest works. Italians were brought in to cook real pasta, replacing the tinned mush they were served. They got olive oil and tomato paste, and some leisure facilities were gradually constructed.
Eros, one of a delegation to Immigration Minister Holt, warned him that he could have a “revolution” on his hands. By the time they returned to Bonegilla, three-quarters of the migrants had been sent to other camps.
In the next seven months, 5,300 Italians were placed in “emergency” work. But Dawson reported ongoing demonstrations “by wildly gesticulating and table thumping Italians, who ... desired to dictate the policy ... in allocating them to employment”.
Voluntary migrants had higher expectations of good jobs than DPs. But they were given jobs that fitted the demands of employers and government, not their aspirations.
In September 1952, the DPs (who Dawson regarded as model migrants) staged a protest. But it was successfully kept out of the press, and the Central Employment Office dismissed their demands: “It is felt that they are better off in Bonegilla than they would have been ... in Displaced Persons’ camps in Europe”.
Militant protests tend to inspire others. In the following months, protests over similar issues occurred at Maribyrnong hostel, Sydney Central Station, Villawood hostel and Matraville.
A new administrator at Bonegilla in 1954, Colonel Henry Guinn, was appalled at the conditions. A cinema and other facilities provided some diversion, 13,000 trees were planted, and more gender and national equality was observed.
In the late 1950s, some remained for years in camp jobs, denied the opportunity to take control over their lives.
And so to the day, nine years later, in 1961, they erected the sign on the road: “Bonegilla, Place of No hope”. Protesters carried what were said to be “ugly signs” such as “We want work” and “Your barbaric system only worthy of the stone age”. Perhaps the ones in Greek lettering were the ugly ones.
Il Globo, a Melbourne Italian-language newspaper, described how dozens of police pouring into the camp provoked a “second wave of disorder”.
The night after the protest, police rampaged in family huts, breaking the arm of one man who had only days before had surgery. The migrants built barricades from cans, boxes and empty bottles.
Over two days, buildings were damaged and windows smashed. Local and government officials blamed Italians and communists.
The complaints echoed those in 1952: appalling food and facilities, and that they had been enticed to Australia by false promises of good jobs and a better life.
In response to a media barrage of verbal abuse, the Italians, while being a small minority of protesters, proudly acknowledged their leading role and proclaimed that they did not regret anything. Within a few short years, Italian workers would play a prominent, militant role in strikes in the car plants of Ford and GMH.
Trying to hush up the discontent, and playing on Cold War hysteria, ASIO was brought in and threats of deportation were made.
Nevertheless, again the protests won improvements. Many were relocated to urban centres where it was more likely they could find work.
These protests in the face of inhuman authoritarianism, behind barbed wire, isolated from potential supporters, should be better known. They are part of the history of workers’ struggles in this racist country.
They challenge the myths and lies of the official heart-warming narrative of migrants seamlessly assimilating into a welcoming nation.

Oppression and riots at Bonegilla, the ‘place of no hope’

News that the annual cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is predicted to reach $50 billion in 2025-26 has caused much handwringing in Canberra and in the media. So much that NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has announced a review of waste in the scheme. 
Despite the high levels of spending, people living with disabilities are far from being well provided for under this scheme. A small percentage have managed to traverse the bureaucratic maze to get things such as home assistance, wheelchairs and home modifications that substantially improve their lives. No decent person would begrudge them that, whatever the cost. But much of the NDIS budget is absorbed by profiteering providers, which means greater spending, without a major overhaul of the scheme, will not improve the situation for most people living with disability.
Des Graham, the chair of MS Australia (a NDIS provider for people with multiple sclerosis), says the NDIS is “clearly broken”. People living with disability, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-31/qld-health-multiple-scelosis-patients-let-down-by-broken-ndis/101386048">he told the ABC</a>, are either “not getting access to it”, or, if they are, “aren’t getting the right packages”. Tragically, the way the NDIS was set up means that they were never going to get quality care. A stifling bureaucracy has actually made the situation worse for the vast majority.
In an interview on the ABC’s Insiders in June, Shorten declared that the NDIS “is a bureaucratic nightmare ... a maze of red tape”. This is not just the result of bad management, as he implied. The NDIS is the epitome of the kind of bureaucracy typical of capitalism. Georg Lukacs, the Hungarian Marxist, explained such bureaucracies as “the formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civil service etc”, debasing “all social functions”, which in turn “results in an inhuman, standardised division of labour” typical of a factory. The result is sterile, repetitive uniformity divorced from the needs of individuals and driven by the capitalist mentality that reduces everything to a monetary value. This perfectly describes the reality of the NDIS. 
The Productivity Commission drew up the model for the scheme in 2011 based on a proposal from the extreme right-wing Institute of Public Affairs. It emphasised the need “to have clear rules about who is entitled to what; careful processes for assessing the needs of people with disabilities; careful management of the costs of the scheme”. These phrases warned of a bureaucratic nightmare. 
It was explicit from the start that very few living with disability would be eligible. The documents repeatedly referred to the fact that it was intended only for those under 65, with a “significant and ongoing disability” (their italics). The minority who fit that description—as assessed by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which administers the scheme—would get services and resources to meet only what was deemed “reasonable and necessary needs”.
The assessment of those needs considers any support an applicant gets from family and friends. So no matter how difficult it is for your family to provide you with support, the agency can rule you ineligible for NDIS funding on the basis that you already get some support. In other words, family members are effectively compelled to provide services that the state should be responsible for. 
The process of having your needs assessed is intimidating in its complexity. The Productivity Commission report says that people would “choose an intermediary to be a service broker, provide management services, personal planning etc.” and that disability support organisations could “act as intermediaries”. Intermediaries! Service brokers! This language deliberately reframes services that people need and have a right to as commercial interactions that must be subject to commercial considerations. 
Worse still, plans drawn up by these “service brokers” are often sent to the NDIA without the claimant having a chance to review them. If they want to make any changes to the submission after the NDIA has approved or rejected it, they have to start their application all over again.
Claims are also expected to fit into boxes that don’t necessarily reflect individuals’ experiences. Variation or nuance are frequently treated as suspect, likely to be an invention by the claimant to pocket more than their entitlements. As if to emphasise the sterile, inhuman, bureaucratic approach expected of assessors, a system similar to Robodebt has been considered as the way to assess people’s needs and calculate their entitlements.
As it is, people with complex needs are often assessed during a single phone call by people untrained in disability support. Kelly (not her real name) lives with MS, the most common incurable chronic neurological condition in Australia, with which around 25,000 people live. “My neurologist ... was like, ‘Are you kidding me? They are asking you for proof that you can’t be cured?’”, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-31/qld-health-multiple-scelosis-patients-let-down-by-broken-ndis/101386048">she told the ABC</a>. “It was really deflating. If they [the NDIS] don’t understand about it not being cured, how are they going to understand what help I need?” Kelly has to use a wheelchair away from home and lives with constant fatigue and pain. She is “disappointed and baffled” that her claim to increase funds for an exercise physiotherapist from one hour a week to two was refused.
A 2021 CSIRO study into how the NDIS serves people with MS highlighted how the lack of trained staff leads to the denial of people’s rights. It found that it was far more likely someone with restricted mobility—such as needing a walking stick or wheelchair—got the support they need than did those living with “invisible” disabilities caused by neurological conditions. Declining cognition, disabling neurological pain and the like—caused by Parkinson’s disease, MS, brain injuries and similar conditions—are much less understood by non-specialists. 
Des Graham says the NDIA needs to recognise it is not a disease management expert:
“It is quite unbelievable the amount of assessments you get from your specialist neurologist, your specialist pain physician, from your urologist that goes into your application, only for someone who’s unqualified, with all due respect, to make a decision that in fact you’re not entitled to that package because you don't meet the criteria.”
Parents with children on the Autism spectrum also deal with uncomprehending assessors. Their children’s need for support at school is often dismissed as something education departments should fund. People with a range of conditions are often told that they should be accessing support or therapy through the health system rather than the NDIS, which frequently means the denial of affordable support. 
The NDIS also doesn’t help the majority of people living with disability. Around 4.4 million people are estimated to be living with disabilities in Australia. The NDIS covers only 518,000 of them. Shorten spelled out clearly on Insiders that the NDIS “can’t subsidise everyone”—it is “only a lifeboat in the ocean”. Nearly four million are not just locked out of the NDIS, but have lost previously affordable services, leaving them, as Shorten himself described it, in the “wasteland” outside of the scheme.
Before the NDIS, many of those four million relied on community, not-for-profit and disability advocacy organisations for subsidised services such as physiotherapy, home care, social support and the like. But state governments, using the excuse that they bear half the cost of the NDIS, embarked on a massive drive to defund and privatise these “second tier” support services.
Many living with neurological conditions don’t fulfil the NDIS criteria, but do need things like hydro, physio or occupational therapy. Previously, MS Australia provided physiotherapy for under $10 a session by specialists trained to understand MS. Now, they offer services only to NDIS participants. The thousands locked out pay around $90 a session for therapists with minimal knowledge of MS.
Health sector unions <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/ndis-work-bans-imposed-fight-privatisation">campaigned</a> against the closures and privatisation of the not-for-profit sector. But like most union campaigns of recent years, they were not prepared to make the necessary fuss it would have taken to stop the attack. Privatisation has meant sackings and cuts to workers’ conditions, with many forced to offer their services as individual contractors.
So virtually all services for people living with disability are now privatised. This means people’s needs are commodities to be bargained for on the market, the fulfilment of the IPA’s neoliberal vision. As its designers intended, companies salivate over what Michael Pascoe, <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2022/11/16/michael-pascoe-ndis-reform-privatisation/">writing at the New Daily</a>, called the “NDIS honeypot”.
In October, health insurer NIB announced that it intends to become an NDIS plan manager. To this end it is buying up Maple, the seventh largest NDIS service provider, with the tag line “profit for purpose”. Citing the billions being poured into the scheme, NIB informed investors: “The NDIS has become a vitally important part of Australia’s social capital and a significant economic sector”. 
Even right-wing economists are cynical. Ross Gittins, quoted by Pascoe, said: “Contracting out to providers in ‘thin markets’—a Productivity Commission euphemism for pretending there’s a market where none exists—is a big part of the reason for the blowout in the cost of the NDIS”.
Shorten insists that reducing NDIS spending won’t affect claimants. He promises to root out corrupt providers and others rorting the system. But he’s unlikely to change its basic structure, which is what it would take to fix it.
Tragically, the appalling state of existing disability services in 2012 led to overwhelming support for the NDIS. The Labor government and then the Liberal government, backed by many in the disability sector, nurtured unrealistic expectations of a “person centred” scheme “providing choice” and putting people in control of their care. Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes declared that people with disabilities were “Overjoyed, crying with relief”.
The MS Australia magazine, In Touch, after years of uncritically touting the NDIS, has at last begun to face the reality of this neoliberal nightmare, running articles like one about 45-year-old Rebecca. Rebecca can’t walk more than five metres unaided, and suffers falls. She experiences, among other things, daily brain fog and chronic fatigue, and struggles to find words.
Her experience is typical: after submitting a claim, she was contacted and asked, “Can you catch the bus and walk 10 metres?” “It would depend on the day”, she replied, a typical response by anyone living with MS. Her claim was peremptorily rejected via a subsequent phone call.
Disability advocacy groups campaign to have people who understand particular disabilities on the NDIA and as assessors. While this would be welcome, the bureaucratic straitjacket surrounding the scheme, plus the corrupting influence of privatisation, means this would not adequately compensate for the system’s deficiencies.
What is needed is a universal, publicly funded scheme organised to meet the needs of those living with disability, not one dependent on for-profit disability service providers overseen by money-grubbing bureaucrats. This won’t be won without a massive campaign by unions and those who genuinely support the rights of people living with disability.
In other words, the fate of disability care depends on rebuilding a fighting left and union movement prepared to fight for all the oppressed. This is not easy to achieve. But the goal is a good guide to what the next steps are that will eventually get us to winning the care and support that are the human rights of all.

NDIS fails people living with disability

Victorian Socialists—recognised by Beat magazine as “the most left-wing option Victorians have this election”, and by PEDESTRIAN.TV as “Fierce door knockers and grassroots campaigners”—is making a mammoth effort to push against the grain of history in the state election. The party has a chance of getting Jerome Small elected to the upper house in Northern Metro and Liz Walsh in Western Metro. If successful, it will be only the third time a socialist independent of the ALP has been elected to any Australian parliament. 
The first was Percy Brookfield, a leading militant in the Broken Hill mines. Historian Humphrey McQueen described Brookfield as “possibly the most extreme anti-politician ever to be elected in this country” whose “probity withstood parliament”. In 1916, Brookfield led a successful fight for a 44-hour week for miners and played a prominent role in the anti-conscription campaign. His role in supposedly riotous actions, combined with the fact that he cursed the British Empire and called Labor leader Billy Hughes a “traitor, viper and skunk”, landed him in jail and incurred penalties worth the equivalent of about $75,000 today.
The right hated Brookfield because he supported the Russian revolution and defended the persecuted Industrial Workers of the World. He was Labor MP for Sturt in the NSW upper house from 1917, resigned from Labor in 1919, and was re-elected as a member of the Industrial Socialist Labor Party in 1920. Tragically, Brookfield was killed by a disturbed gunman in March 1921. A tall column in his memory, topped with a globe inscribed with “Workers of the world unite” dominates the entrance to the Broken Hill cemetery.
The second was Fred Paterson, who won the Queensland seat of Bowen for the Communist Party in 1944 and 1947. He used his position to organise support for striking railway workers in 1948. Labor Premier Ned Hanlon described a bill to outlaw picketing as the “Paterson Bill”, because it was designed to thwart tactics used by the Bowen MP.
The political situation today is very different from that of 1920 or 1944, when radical politics had much greater influence. Over the last two decades, the forces of the socialist left have contracted. Our unions, which have at times have led serious struggles, have retreated from class struggle militancy. Serious ongoing social movement mobilisations have also declined. 
Yet economic and environmental crises continue to wrack society; now as much as ever we need a socialist movement prepared to defy authority, to hold onto its principles even when in a minority and to take the fight up to the hated billionaires and corporations. This begs the question: how can participating in parliament, dominated as it is by sterile debates mostly involving contemptible careerists, play a role in rebuilding the sort of movement we need?
First, simply campaigning to get principled, left-wing activists into parliament can draw people into activism and provide a sense of purpose that would otherwise be lacking. Already, there are many more people involved with Victorian Socialists than when it was set up four years ago. Hundreds of volunteers have knocked on more than 150,000 doors over the course of the campaign: a monumental achievement. 
The hundreds of young people who imbue the campaign with enthusiasm and energy are gaining experience explaining why capitalism is to blame for the rising cost of living, wage stagnation and the lack of public transport, schools and hospitals. They are finding ways to use socialist theory to argue why standing against racism and gender oppression is necessary to build a united campaign against the material deprivations workers suffer. New and experienced activists are together visiting picket lines, like that of the Knauf workers in Port Melbourne. 
Second, Victorian Socialists view electoral politics not as a means in itself, but as a way to strengthen struggles on the ground. The party has helped organise protest rallies for Tamil refugees, abortion rights, against climate change, and has attended rallies in solidarity with the mass uprising in Iran. It has thrown its weight behind community campaigns, like the one to save the Preston Market and to defend public housing. 
This approach is reflected in the choice of candidates. The Victorian Socialists’ lead candidates, Liz and Jerome, both have long histories as grassroots activists, unionists and leaders. Liz participated in high school walk outs against Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s, and in the 25 years since has fought tirelessly for Indigenous, refugee and LGBTI rights. A highlight of Jerome’s four decades of activism was his contribution to the campaign that stopped the Jabiluka uranium mine on the land of the Mirrar people.
Liz and Jerome will not just represent workers and the oppressed; they will stand with them in protests, on pickets and by helping organise others in solidarity. They won’t just show up to give speeches at rallies; they will use parliament at every opportunity to advertise campaign activities. Theirs will be voices urging workers to stand together, explaining why each and every protest deserves and needs support.
Electoral work isn’t the only step on the road to rebuilding a socialist movement, and nor is it a short cut to that goal. But it can and has already played an important part in reinvigorating activism, expanding the horizons of political engagement and winning more people to the idea that capitalism needs to be challenged. For those who already see the need for radical change, it shows them that they are not alone—that there are others out there willing to take a stand. 
We have a chance to go against the grain of politics-as-usual and make history on 26 November by putting a socialist into parliament. Be part of it.
What you can do:
<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/vote">Vote 1 Victorian Socialists in both houses</a>. A critical mass of first preferences is vital if the Victorian Socialists are to have any chance of success. 
<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/volunteer">Help campaign</a>. Pre-poll voting stations are open from 14 November and election day is 26 November. Every volunteer makes a difference and helps get the message out. 
<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/donate">Donate</a>. The Victorian Socialists are not backed by corporations or the wealthy. They depend on donations from supporters. If you can donate, do so! Even small amounts matter.

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